A sourdough starter is not a metaphor, I tell myself when one dies on my watch. It’s a bit of fermented flour, a microbial jumble of bacteria and yeast, used by cooks to raise doughs and give baked things a delicious, complicated tang. It is not a plant, or a low-maintenance pet in a romantic comedy, whose health and happiness reflect its owner’s maturity.

A dead starter could be caused by a rare bloom of mold. Or a little too much time somewhere hot. It could be a persistent lethargy that slows things down once and for all. Neglect, really. But the truth is that sourdough starters are fairly sturdy, and they can live long, untragic lives too, passed down through generations, bubbling on for years. I know this is true because Angela Johnson Sherry, a massage therapist who lives in Bedford-Stuyvesant, in Brooklyn, is the keeper of one that was born in her grandparents’ kitchen 61 years ago.

Just after they were married, when they were living along the Missouri River near Fort Peck Dam, Leo and Margaret Murr bought a packet of dry sourdough starter at a grocery store, went home and mixed it up. Once a week, the newlyweds fed their starter with flour and milk, and let it ferment overnight. They reserved some of that airy mass to make the next week’s pancakes, and mixed the rest with eggs, salt, baking soda and sugar, to make some pancakes right away. It was a recipe without an end, and it made optimism part of their routine, always giving the couple another batch to look forward to. They went on making pancakes.

Sherry remembers filling pillowcases with tiny red chokecherries every summer when she was young, when they grew wild on the trees in Glasgow, Mont. Her grandfather canned the juice so that all year long he could boil it with sugar. By the time Sherry got there for breakfast, which was every Sunday morning, the house smelled of fresh sourdough, pancakes browning in butter and hot chokecherry syrup.

A few years ago, for her grandparents’ 60th wedding anniversary, Sherry went home and made an extra-big batch of pancakes for her entire family to celebrate. “My grandmother has since passed away,” she said. “But this thing my grandparents started, it’s still a part of our family.”

It’s a part of other families too. Nearly a decade ago, Sherry shared the recipe with Jean Adamson, the owner of Vinegar Hill House in Brooklyn, and Adamson has been serving the pancakes every weekend since. “We didn’t mess with the recipe much,” Adamson said, “except we put it in a cast-iron pan in the wood-fired oven.”

Adamson also ladled in more batter, so it ran all the way to the edges of the pan, and then even more batter, so it went up almost a half-inch high. The resulting pancake is fat and gorgeous, brown and crusty on its edges, as thick and even as a layer of birthday cake. Baked into the bottom of the pancake there is always some fruit: raspberries and peaches in the summer, strawberries and blueberries, caramelized bananas, or sliced apples and pears.

Any hot oven will do, but a cast-iron pan is ideal for even browning and crisp edges, and for maintaining, at the very center, a little spot of tenderness that’s almost closer to custard than pancake. And you’ll need some starter. Flour and fruit juice ferments with time, but it might be easier to find someone already caring for a starter of her own, and call in a favor. You can also order some online. I got my latest starter from Adamson, who got it from Sherry. For now it’s still alive, making yeasty little burps in the back of my fridge. Every week, I make it an offering of flour and milk to keep it happy and well fed.

“I have given my starter to every person I know, so I know I can always have it,” Sherry said. This is starter logic: It’s sharing, not hoarding, that ensures survival. When Sherry travels to see friends, she puts some of her starter in a glass jar, inside a double layer of plastic bags, and tucks it into her suitcase. Then she crosses her fingers and hopes it doesn’t break. Wherever she goes, she makes pancakes and leaves behind some starter: proof that no matter what happens between this week and next, something sweet is also waiting.